Schensul: Why you need to go to the Jersey Shore

In Belmar, locals have turned a concrete barricade into a thank-you card - and an invitation for the summer.

My first stop, I’ll admit it, was the coaster. I came to see the roller coaster in the ocean.

I’d seen it so often, so often on TV, and still it looked so … bizarre. Surreal. Impossible.

Who wouldn’t make a beeline for the shoreline of Seaside Heights, to see it for oneself?

To see what has become an icon of the destruction. To see what Sandy — what nature — hath wrought?

I have been here now, at the Jersey Shore, for nearly a week. I have not seen the coaster in the water. For a time, I got waylaid. Eventually, it became irrelevant. In the end, I realized the coaster was a symbol, an image that had served its purpose.

It had reminded us of what we loved about the Jersey Shore.

It had also reminded us of the power and ruthlessness of Mother Nature. And how what we loved could be taken away from us with a simple wave of her hand.

The coaster symbol served its purpose. Maybe a little too well.

It not only broke our hearts, but it damaged our idea of the Jersey Shore. So powerful was that image, and others — empty stretches where once boardwalks stood, sand piles in living rooms, fish floating in churches — that our image of the Shore was shocked into shifting. The destruction was so great we couldn’t imagine even one grain of sand had remained untouched by the superstorm.

We couldn’t imagine ever coming back here. It would be too sad. Too disorienting. Too ghoulish. It would be too unlike the Shore we knew and loved, the one that was the setting for all of our summer memories.

We think about staying away.

That is what happens when disaster hits. And when disaster hits a destination dependent on tourism, staying away becomes yet another disaster for those already struggling to get back on their feet.

Every year I see it, mostly around hurricane season. In the wake of any major weather event come the tourist officials’ worries, the launch of new marketing campaigns, package deals and discounts. Every year, tourism is threatened when an area is ravaged, when the mom-and-pop tourist attractions and hotels go under — literally, figuratively, or both.

For the most part, I just get the headlines, or press releases, or sound bites. They are newsworthy, and the concerns are understandable, and I mollify any twinge of responsibility with the thought that time will take care of it. We do, after all, forget. Nature and human beings are resilient, and both do abhor vacuums.

And yet, when you love something, or someone, or somewhere, that may not be enough. For me — for so many people — the somewhere was New Orleans, and the reason was Katrina. New Orleans was a place that had lodged itself in my heart long before any levy broke. Through its music, its locals, its quirks and its swampy summer heat, through the nights I had spent being spun ’round the dance floor at Tipitina’s to eating alone but not lonely on the balcony at some restaurant on Decatur Street, New Orleans had become, to me, a place with a heartbeat. A living, breathing entity. Not until Katrina did I understand what that meant. Because Katrina almost killed her. And I could not watch as she lay there, her heartbeat faint and fading. I couldn’t just watch; I had a responsibility. I was invested, with all my heart. I had to go and help administer my own sort of CPR.

My friend Millie, one of the hundreds of thousands of locals there suffering from Katrina brain, at first was so giddy to be alive she had gone and bought herself a big new pickup truck — of which she had no use. But the giddiness of good luck fades, especially when confronted with mounds of wreckage, and streets, neighborhoods, whole sections of your world without electricity.

But after a few months of headlining on the nightly news, New Orleans’ plight began to fade from public concern. People think: They’re doing OK. It’s been three months, they’re not in the headlines, they’ve gotta be OK.

They were not OK. Millie confided, "We feel abandoned."

Abandoned.

Of all things, to abandon the very thing, the very place you love.

And so as the words, the press releases, the headlines began to appear from the Shore, the place so many of us love, they resonated in my ears, my mind, my heart. Who hasn’t felt abandoned?